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Tetrahedral Chess. Three dimensional variant with board in form of tetrahedron. (7x(), Cells: 84) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

Jared McComb wrote on Sat, Jan 10, 2004 04:13 AM UTC:

Here's the deal.  The boards are topologically identical, but I find the
directions easier to visualize when the board is reoriented like that,
since it is easier to see that the orthogonal directions are parallel to
the edges of the board.  I do not have any RT software at the moment, but
I'm working on a variant using this setup myself, so you may see an MS
Paint interpretation sometime soon.

Here's a quick'n'dirty diagram of what I mean, on a 10-cell board:

  R
 Y G    B
R B R  G Y  R

(Each layer is centered on top of the previous one.)

As you may be able to see, when the board is reoriented in this way, each
layer has a four-color tiling that makes Dabbabante (spelling?) moves
about ten times easier to see, and it opens itself up to interesting
interpretations of 'triagonal' movement.  For example, the two green
cells in the example above could be considered 'triagonally' adjacent. 
If you use a Glinski interpretation of a bishop, and extend it into all
four 'hexagonal' planes that come out of a single cell, you get a
non-colorbound piece.

The problem with this setup is that it muddles your interpretation of pawn
moves a bit, since 'forward' is in a totally different direction.

If I'm not making any sense here, don't mind me.  I came up with this a
couple years ago on graph paper, and had been thinking about it a while
before the 84SC, but I'm only now realizing the parallells.